Scream Queen of My Heart

He has spent a decade playing the monster. One very public breakup just convinced the internet he is one.

The studio wants Levi Vaughn wholesome again, so his publicist ships him home to Copper Hollow, Vermont, the week the whole town throws its Halloween Homecoming.

Sadie Marsh is running that festival on caffeine and stubbornness, and it is one bad budget away from cancellation. She needs a famous face. He needs a hometown sweetheart story. So they shake on a lie: fake dating, one week, no feelings.

Then the cottage boiler dies, the only spare bed in town is a cot in the storeroom behind her candle shop, and Copper Hollow decides the two of them are the best thing to happen since the covered bridge.

Nobody warned Sadie that the scariest man in horror would take a pie contest more seriously than a murder scene. Forty-one pies. Written verdicts. A man who has been stabbed on camera forty-one times, undone by a soggy bottom crust and a town that will not stop leaving casseroles on his doorstep.

Nobody warned Levi that the woman stapling flyers to every lamppost would be the first person in years to talk to the man instead of the mask.

One week. One storeroom wall. A deal neither of them planned to mean.

She is always the one who stays. He is always the one who leaves.

Unless, this once, they both get it backward on purpose.